Distant Worlds

TJ Benson (bio)

Before the screams got to Zuana, he sprang out of sleep and clamped his teeth to mute his own. Panting, he looked around to make sure he was really alive, then he did the ten inhale-pause—exhale breath exercises his mother had taught him. Yes, this world was real, the nightmare was over. He stretched out his arms with a yawn so that the snakes that had been sleeping with him could wrap themselves round his body, around his chest and arms and wring him dry of the fear spurting from his heart into his head. They enjoyed this part of their morning ritual more than he did, perhaps remembering some malevolent trait from their cousins in distant worlds.

No one else lived with snakes in Vande, his agemates were happy with monkeys and birds and several other animals but only snakes were sufficient company for him. They kept following him everywhere until his parents allowed him bring them home. He had twin marks of their play-bites all over his body but he knew they loved him, all of them. It was an almost barbaric love he could manage and understand. All creatures were not the same. We all loved differently.

His mother always said this.

If not for the pangs of fear ebbing out of his body, he felt relaxed, his bed of shifting sand had massaged his back while he slept. Usually he would jump out of bed calling for his mother or fathers, but the dream still had a hold on him even though he couldn’t remember it. He pursed his lips to practice smiling so that he wouldn’t worry them; however, once his mother came in, she knew what had happened.

“Another dream came to scare you” she said without question and leaned forward to kiss his forehead. The elaborate gold tree that spread into two branches of her protruding shoulder blades disappeared into her wrapper, but they glistened and her big eyes were dizzy so he knew she had been with his fathers. “Can you remember this one, child of mine?”

His two fathers entered his room, both adjusting their wrappers round their waists and he fell back to the bed, groaning. They would make a fuss out of it. “I am sorry, I’m sorry you people should go.”

“He is shy,” said Hirekaan, his clown father, the one who made their household tremble with laughter. “He is shy of us.”

“I don’t know where he learnt it from,” replied Anza, the warrior father. “We made him.”

“He is not shy of us,” said the mother, pulling his hands from his face. Then she smiled wickedly. “That will come by the next sun circle when his body starts ripening.”

“Mother!”

“He is not shy of us.” Her face became serious. “He tires of being a burden. He thinks he is our burden. Zuana you have us. We belong to you.”

“Yes, yes,” Hirekaan added. “Your mother married two husbands so that you will be protected back and front. And even those your dreams that are scaring you, your father Anza will enter inside and fight the things inside ehn. Me I will stay here, I am scared of that your little mind, the things you sit down and think.” He fake-shuddered and made a feverish sound.

Zuana almost smiled. So did his mother. Anza shook his head, walked around the bed and sat next to him. “What did I tell you when I took you up to the peak the last Moon Circle, can you remember our lesson?”

Zuana nodded but Anza’s face bore down on him impatiently so he said, “That you, me, mother, and father Hirekaan are one tree. If something happens to a leaf, something happens to the tree. If something happens to me, something happens to all of you. We are one.”

“Exactly,” said Anza. “And together, we push our people into the future.”

“Or maybe you are scared of sleeping alone?” Hirekaan’s eyes shined with mischief. “Maybe he is ripe already, maybe it’s time for him to mate.” His fathers laughed. His mother didn’t. Neither did he. Hirekaan coughed and cleared his throat. Whenever she didn’t laugh at his jokes he was a little hurt. “Let me go and turn that your drink. I’ll add plenty sugarcane juice to make you happy.”

“I hope the mix hasn’t soaked for too long,’ said Anza, standing up from the bed and dusting the sand off his waist wrapper. “Let it not turn to the drink of those old elders.” He walked to meet Hirekaan leaning on the door and clapped his back in camaraderie, eyes twinkling. “We don’t want our son to start getting drunk yet.”

Hirekaan smiled a bit but grew serious which was unusual of him. “What are you doing today? I heard about the intruders.”

“Intruders?” Mother turned to them from the sand bed. Zuana sat up. “White men?”

“Visitors. Just visitors eh. You all try to steady your hearts, don’t die of shock and leave me with this boy.”

“Talk to us,” urged mother, standing up and tightening her woven blue wrap under her arms. “Tell us what you can tell us.”

Anza sighed and looked at the ground. “I am representing our nation this time.”

There were sounds of discomfort in the room.

“Why you Papa?”

“Because it is my turn.”

“Why can’t mother go? She has already gone before.”

“You know it is the way of our people, we only choose a head to represent us when faced with outsiders. I must go now because it is my turn. You know what happens to our neighboring nations who have kings, you know.”

Mother crossed her arms. “I know it is the white men.”

Anza laughed an empty laugh but none of them bought it. “Come on, we have had other black tribes visit us; didn’t we visit this place from the Congo ourselves?”

No one responded, so he sighed, ‘Okay, yes, white men. I should leave Hirekaan to do the job of making us laugh in this house.”

“What do they—”

“And before you say anything I want you to know they are not a threat.”

She rolled her eyes. “What do they want?”

“I will find out. For a century they have come with different things and it has always been our culture to listen, to welcome visitors. If what they offer to share is not conducive for us, we can tell them to leave. It won’t be the first time.” He turned to Hirekaan, placed a hand on his shoulder and whispered, “Maybe take our boy for the Moon Circle meeting today? Our wife is passing blood and you know she is too stubborn to rest. Till I come back.”

Hirekaan nodded.

_____

As Anza walked out of the forest to the beach, he tried not to think of Zuana’s nightmares. Rather he focused on the dreams that plagued his mind all through the day. Only his wife’s lips and his co-husband’s jokes could clear his head. This was why he never wanted to leave home. Ah, home. He had not spent up to twenty minutes on the ground and he already missed his home. The horn of the ship made him look up and shield his eyes with a hand, the better to see it. He had not seen it because his mind was still with his family, up in the mountains. He watched as a figure climbed down a ladder to the shore in the distance. He had docked here some days ago, waiting for response. Anza was wearing a red suit, in the fashion of these visitors, so that they would feel more comfortable and he couldn’t wait for the meeting to be over. If their plans to colonize his people had worked, everyone would have been wearing this sort of thing! Under this sun! Anza shook his head at the thought. A bead of sweat trickled down his armpit.

“Hello!” called the white man, barely a distance away.

“Hello!” Anza called back, nervous that he hadn’t replied with the appropriate response. It had been long since he had spoken English. Everyone had to learn world languages, it was mandatory in Vande so that they could handle situations like this.

The white man waved, and when he got to Anza, extended a hand. He was wearing lighter clothing than Anza, just a shirt that seemed to be of wool tucked into large trousers. Anza was a bit embarrassed at having over-dressed, and slapped his chest in reverence instead of taking the man’s hand. “Hello,” he greeted again, dropping his hand, a wry smile on his face.

“Hello.”

“I was thinking,” said the white man, “you reckon we go back to the ship for a drink? I would have invited you to a bar but you don’t have those here.” He spread out his arms at “here.”

Anza smiled at the joke. “Thank you, but it is too hot for that. This hot sun, drinking? In my community we only drink in the cool of night.”

“I was just thinking we could sit there and talk? Or we could go to your home and chat?”

Anza suppressed a wave of panic and smiled. “Oh, you couldn’t climb to our city. It’s up the mountain in the trees.”

The white man’s eyes rounded with wonder. “I heard. That’s one of the things I looked forward to seeing in fact. Not if, of course, it is not permitted,” he added when he saw the look on Anza’s face. He slicked his red hair away from his face with a hand. “I understand your community is secretive.”

“We are just careful with foreigners; foreigners bring all kinds of spirit.”

“You mean infections . . .”

“—and pollute us. It has happened to other tropical communities. We can talk on your ship.”

There was an awkward silence Anza actually found preferable to the man’s chatter. But the man liked to talk.

“So what measures do you use to purify yourself?” he asked when they got to the ship.

“What?”

“You said quite correctly that my presence might expose your community to foreign pathogens, yet they sent you.” The man turned to look Anza in the eye. “Are you some sacrifice?”

“Me? Oh no! No, no. After meeting you I will take baths in the ocean that brought you for several mornings, I will eat some herbs then bathe in ritual smoke for seven days, that is a week, then I return to my people.”

“You must miss them.”

Anza smiled thinking of Hirekaan, Zuana and his wife, his heart, the flower of all flowers, fecundity itself. “You know what my people would have called you?” he asked the white man, after he told him his name.

“What?” Anza could hear the smile in his voice. “I am curious.”

“They would have called you Red. The red white man.”

“My hair. Good one. Come this way. The captain’s cabin is this way.”

Anza allowed Red lead him past the bewildered men to the captain’s cabin. He sat where the man gestured him to sit. “You know I was thinking,” he said rolling his shoulders in the suit. “I was thinking so these are the kinds of clothes your people would have forced us to wear if you succeeded in colonizing us.”

Red’s face went red and Anza found it fascinating. He didn’t think the color change was a reaction to his words so he continued, “I think about it all the time. How would our colonial masters draw boundaries?”

“I may have grown up in England but I will have you know I am Irish, my people never tried to colonize your people.”

“Oh, I am joking—”

“It’s fine, it’s fine, I am not offended at all. I was just thinking I have known you somewhere before, have we met?”

Anza laughed. “This is my first time touching water sand to my feet. I was born in our home in the mountain.”

“Don’t mind me,” Red chuckled. “I really wish I could visit, heard amazing things about the city, a city held up by trees and carved into the face of the mountain in dazzling fractals, the architecture, I can’t imagine. You must miss it.”

Anza leaned back in his chair and the upholstery squeaked under him. He said, “Why are you here? Why have you come?”

Red sighed and leaned back. “Our astrologers have picked up a disturbing cosmic activity leading here. Our physicists and geologists all have the same conclusion, there are other universes, darker worlds. One of such worlds is coming. We believe a young child in your community will be the key to unlock this world. Such a child might already experience headaches, daydreams, and nightmares.”

Anza’s blood froze all over and Red continued, “But something tells me you already know this.”

Anza turned to look at the deckhands mopping, but the white man stood up and followed his gaze. “I was sent to bring the child. He would be observed by our finest scientists—”

But Anza was already shaking his head and chuckling at the thought of his wife giving up their child.

“A darker world is coming. Please talk to your people because we cannot escape it. We cannot.”

And they stared at each other for a long time.

_____

As night fell, she remembered the first day of her life, the day she washed up on the shores of Vande. She had no memory from before, not even when she was brought back to the ocean weeks after she was strong again. There was no wrecked boat, just her, wearing garments the people of Vande had never seen before. She had opened her eyes to the world for the first time and saw the faces of two men, two suns shining down on her. One pensive, the other amused. My name is Anza the pensive one said and his name is Hirekaan. You are safe.

She didn’t think of this day often, but Anza had not returned and Hirekaan had taken Zuana to the mountain peak for the full moon meeting with other boys and girls at the cusp of their ripening. They would be around a large fire and under the instructions of their fathers, they would recite the knowledge and understanding they had gathered from childhood, then be instructed on what waited for them on the other side of their ripening, assigned Moon-Circles to preside over for political responsibilities when the time came, and most urgently, taught how to manage the fluids their new bodies would produce.

Blood and semen, the elder presiding over her own moon meeting a year after she arrived had said, form the fabric of human life. She was already a full woman then, but participating in this custom was the way to be properly initiated into the Vande community. Besides, as far as her intellect was concerned, she was not too far from the others who were at the cusp of their own ripening. Then on the final night, when it was time for the new initiates into adulthood to proclaim to everyone who they were and how they would be addressed, she placed her hand on her heart, closed her eyes, and gave herself a new name.

She knew to avoid the question where do I come from? Because there was a more important question that swallowed up that one, a question she felt was more useful to her future. Why did I come here? And this second question she decided, she would spend her life answering.

She had come here to flourish, to build a rich and fulfilling life with her two husbands, and son and in so doing, contribute to the general strength and advancement of their people through their family unit. All the technological innovation, all the new healthy ways of feeding, building, and living people had gotten were products of thriving inner lives, the flourishing of the erotic. She imagined sexual activity and reproduction as the only ways lesser animals could express the erotic in their nature and for this, she pitied them.

She remembered that feeling of rest when she opened her eyes for the first time and saw Hirekaan and Anza, she knew she wanted to spend the rest of her life looking up to their faces. They were childhood friends, so even though Anza had sworn to never mate because he wanted to dedicate his life to protecting their fringe community and Hirekaan enjoyed making many women laugh, they both said yes and moved into their nest, one of the larger homes in Vande, with rock cave rooms painted white, connected with adjoining tree rooms (one of which their son would eventually make into his own) and raffia rope bridges.

Zuana, my son, she said to the stars and turned back into her room. If these dreams persisted, she would have to take him up north to the healers of the flat lands. She knew her boy was trying to be a man and not scare her too much. But he will be fine. All is right in their world.

She left the window and laid down on his bed of sand, perhaps it is was just the right thing her body needed to de-stress. She closed her eyes with a smile, remembering what Hirekaan’s lips felt like on her lips with Anza’s head between her thighs. In no time she was dreaming. In this dream she was someone else, someone with a lover. She couldn’t see this lover clearly because the world was blurry and watery but she could feel the weight of loving him in her dream body, the weight of loving this stranger for a lifetime. They were taking a stroll, a stroll to nowhere.

On this stroll, she turned to look at something, someone that called to her. Called to her in the amorphous language of dreams, or maybe she had imagined it, anyway, she turned to be sure. And she saw herself at a distance, the she who was truly her, dancing in a moon colored dress. And the longer she stared, the more she became this she that was truly her, dancing to this wonderful music she wouldn’t remember when she woke up.

_____

In Moon Circles, Hirekaan would be in the center of other parents, telling them stories, making them laugh as their children slept in a camp at the other end of the peak. This night he wanted to be alone. Nobody bothered him, they all knew he was worried for his co-husband who had gone down to the beach to represent their community and he was worried about his son’s dreams. He was glad to be left alone but he was getting bored. Shouldn’t he rejoin the group so that they could distract him?

Maybe he should have just stayed home with Zuana instead, if a child was sick, absence was allowed. But he wanted to come, he wanted to play and meet his friends. Hirekaan himself was also dying to leave the house, it was gloomy because of Zuana’s bad dreams and Anza’s absence. Yet here he was, alone. He might as well get high then. He brought out a wrap of leaves from his leather waist pouch and chewed them. As the sweet juice sifted through his body, he grunted and laid back on the ground to look at the stars. They were so close from up here.

Then he thought about the children at the cusp of their ripening, wondered what new concept they would add to their culture. It was from this Moon Circle ceremony several sun circles before he was born that a child had shared a dream he had, where they all lived like bees in a honey comb. His father had promptly used clay to model a design the next morning and soon the people who had set up camps at the beach began working on the face of the mountain, hollowing out caves until they had replicated the fractals of a honey comb. Over generations, they had fashioned out water and waste channels connecting each unit. They dyed the walls to the color they preferred then upholstered the rooms with animal skin, sea shells, and wood carvings. The Vande people, the youngest tribe of the Bantu nation, had been sent to the fringe of the land to serve as sentries, but soon they became one of the most sophisticated tribes, with other nations visiting to learn their ways of life; from architecture to cuisine to reading the stars. All of this from a child’s dream.

“Zuana will do well,” he said to the deep vast bowl of stars. And he believed it. The boy was special and always had his own way of doing things. He did his homework and was respectful, so when he told them he wanted his room to be a tree house connected to their home unit, they did not hesitate. As surely as the seasons came and left, his nightmares would soon be over. “Zuana will be well,” he said, descending from the high, his muscles relaxing him to slumber.

He was about to turn over and bury his face in the grass, his mind drifting off to the time Zuana was just a baby crawling all over their house, when the atmosphere changed and he smelt sweat and wet sand.

“Mama, Mama, run Mama, he is coming Mama,” Zuana whispered, shuddering over Hirekaan, eyes closed.

“Zuana!” Hirekaan yelled, jumping up from the grass and shaking his son. “Zuana open your eyes, wake up!”

But he didn’t open his eyes, he kept whispering, “Mama run, he is coming Mama. He is coming for us Mama, run Mama.”

So Hirekaan shook off his panic, threw his son over his back, and started descending the mountain, past other family units, to their home.

_____

Immediately Zuana closed his eyes to sleep that evening, he returned to that large room with walls the color of water. He knew he had been in this room several times before, and that he always forgot when he woke up. The knowledge was frightening, the sense that he knew what would come next if he focused on what was before him hard enough. He knew what he saw would make him scream again, until he woke up. Yet he knew there was no choice.

Even before he looked, he knew on the table was his mother. Except she didn’t look so much like his mother. She was scattered across different worlds, Zuana knew this because half of her face was in a translucent green square, the upper quadrant of the other side was in a translucent violet square with yellow sparks, the lower quadrant in magenta, her neck in red, and so on for her entire body.

And a man was bent over her, yelling at her where are you! Tell me, where are you!

As in other dreams Zuana suddenly remembered, he never saw this man, he just felt his presence in the room, the rage and desperation and menace. But today, as the man moved, he felt himself move, fiddling with a rectangular piece of glass that didn’t reflect his face like the mirrors of Vande, but showed other colors and symbols at command. The glass was some sort of tool, but it wasn’t helping this man. Where are you?

Her body didn’t move but it checked within the several square halos of different colors. Zuana tried to close his eyes and think of where she could be.

Then he saw a woman dancing in a moon-colored dress, dancing closer and closer to him until she became his mother. He called to her but she was lost in her dance so he tried to reach for her, but he felt someone turning to watch him and so he knew he had to run, he had to wake up.

“First thing when the sun rises,” she said once he had woken up and told her and his father Hirekaan, “we are setting off for the healers in the center-lands. Your father will wait for your other father to finish his purification and come up here.”

“But Mama you are not hearing me,” cried Zuana. “I can’t go to sleep, he will use me to find you! I was inside his body, that was why I can’t see him.”

“How can this be?”

“He is my father Mama.”

Hirekaan stood up from the bed of sand. “You want a third father?”

“Mama you carried me from that world to this one. I was inside his body, I remember things that are not my own. I remember you married him, you had to marry him because you had to protect your people but you saw the things he makes, evil things, and so you wanted to run away. He wanted to punish you so he caught you and scattered you in many places at the same time. But your spirit ran here. He couldn’t catch your spirit. Your spirit found this body Mama.”

“You need to lie down and rest,” Hirekaan said. “If you are strong enough we can still go to complete your Moon Circle the next sundown. You don’t want the others to think you are spoilt because you have two fathers plus one extra father from your dreamworld do you?”

Zuana didn’t laugh. He was looking at his mother sitting at one corner of the bed, trying not to look at him. “Is there even need to go back? I will choose Zuana again and again because I love my fathers who chose this name for me. I am also Zivini, son of Triste Ryker, the Mad Scientist who will come from the future to rule this world through me. This I proclaim.”

Hirekaan turned to her in exasperation. “He is talking the talk of drunks now, let me make something to get him to sleep.”

“No,” she said. “Even if he goes back to sleep he would be tortured by these dreams.” She stood up and looked at Zuana with all the pity and love in the world. “Make something to keep him awake for the rest of the night. We will set forth for the healers once the sun rises.” As Hirekaan left the room, she eased him to lie down on the bed. “Even if what you say is true, even if I am here on exile from a mad man, you are still my child, it is not your job to protect me.” She thumbed a tear that had rolled down his cheeks. “It is my job to protect you, to keep you safe and give you a happy childhood.”

But what about you Mama? He wanted to ask as Hirekaan returned with a gourd. What about your childhood? You never got to be a child. You were raised in a mining colony as a child laborer, nobody looked out for you. You were born in a world that had been destroyed and now your new body protects you from it, won’t let you remember, not even in your dreams. Nobody can protect you from him but me Mama, nobody knows him like I do. I am in him, I am his seed cast into the past, cast from another world and being at one with him has filled me with so much language, I can barely understand. My evil father is coming to this world, he is close, he saw me see you dancing in the in between, just like I saw him torture you in his world.

But he drank up the contents of the gourd without any complaint because he loved his mother. We all love differently. He smiled as tears fell from his eyes. He knew what he would have to do. He would miss his fathers. He would miss the way his peers looked at him whenever they climbed up to Moon Circles with them, he was the only boy with two fathers and they all admired him for it.

He waited for his mother and father to leave the room. Then he grabbed one of his snakes by the head and brought it close to his neck. It was stunned and struck him by instinct. As the venom seeped into Zuana’s body, he laid back on his bed, trying to calm the agitated snake. A heaviness came over his body and he could feel the snakes coiling tight round his body and hissing, trying to wring him out of it, but he knew it wouldn’t work. His eyes snapped shut but before his body was pulled into an irreversible sleep, he tried to think happy thoughts like how he loved his snakes, how he loved his mother and fathers and how much dearly he loved this world.

_____

When the screams get to Zuana, his mother’s screams he realizes for the first and last time, he doesn’t wake up. Vande and his mother and two fathers ebb out of his consciousness and become a distant dream, a forgotten world he would never wake into or reach again. His is in a black space with no stars and he knows if he concentrates hard enough, two windows will open and he would see his mother scattered across worlds yet anchored in body to that table, his father yelling and wreaking evil over her. Zuana steadies himself. He doesn’t reach for the windows. When he feels the presence turn back to regard him, he says “father I am here” to the deep dark void.

TJ Benson is a Nigerian writer and visual artist whose work explores the body in the context of memory, African Spirituality, migration, utopia and the unconscious self. His work has been exhibited and published in several journals, and his Saraba Manuscript Prize shortlisted Africanfuturist collection of short stories We Won’t Fade into Darkness was published by Parresia in 2018. His debut novel (TheMadhouse) was published in 2021 by Masobe Books and Penguin Random House SA, and his second novel, People Live Here, was published in June 2022. He has facilitated writing workshops, more recently teaching a class on magical realism and surrealism within the context of African literature for Lolwe Magazine and an Inkubator workshop for Short Story Day Africa. He has attended residencies in Ebedi Nigeria, Moniack Mhor Scotland, Art Omi New York, and is a University of Iowa International Writing Program Spring Fellow. He currently lives in an apartment full of plants and is in danger of becoming a cat person.